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On May 3, 2023, the Brookings Center for Sustainable Development hosted a public event on the recently released USAID Policy Framework. USAID Deputy Administrator Isobel Coleman presented the highlights, followed by a panel representing USAID and civil society discussing specific aspects of the framework. Generating a conversation around USAID's roles and objectives as articulated in…

The main goal of the article is to present to Polish readers the most important information about one of the newer theories of the public policy process - Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The NPF assumes that public policy narratives play a fundamental role in the public policy process. These are strategically constructed stories about the causes and solutions to public policy problems. Actors use narratives to achieve their goals, for example, implementing policies closest to their preferences. On the example of the government's "Good start" ("Dobry start" in Polish) program, the article presents practical applications of the NPF at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

This background paper was prepared for the Bank of Canada conference on the 2021 renewal of the inflation-control agreement between the Bank and the Government of Canada held online in August 2020. The first part of the paper focuses on the fact that the room for conventional monetary stimulus is being limited by the narrow space remaining between the neutral level of the policy interest rate, estimated to be 2.5 percent and expected to remain low for some time, and the effective lower bound on this policy rate, set by the Bank of Canada at 0.25 percent. Two means of getting greater monetary stimulus would be for the Bank to keep on purchasing long-term assets on a large scale, or to increase its inflation target by a couple of percentage points, say from 2 percent to 3 or 4 percent. But the macroeconomic effectiveness of the first option is uncertain, and there would most likely be strong political opposition to increasing the inflation rate to 4 percent, or even only to 3 percent. In the short term, therefore, federal and provincial budgets are the only policy instrument that can make up for the shortcomings of monetary policy - however difficult policy coordination may be - and bring the Canadian economy to fully recover from the current recession without delay. The second part of the paper reviews results that Bank of Canada researchers have obtained in comparing the macroeconomic performance of various monetary policy frameworks with the help of their macro-econometric model of the Canadian economy called ToTEM. I am led to conclude that the 2021 agreement should keep the current flexible inflation targeting framework and continue to have it operated independently by our central bank, but that a somewhat more flexible approach than in the past could be welfare-improving. In particular, it could specify that maximizing employment is a prime concern of the Bank of Canada jointly with keeping inflation low and stable. This dual concern has been the bread and butter of the US Federal Reserve since it was legislated by the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978. It would be beneficial for Canadians if the renewed agreement began to clarify how the two instruments of monetary and fiscal policy will be coordinated to achieve these two interdependent macroeconomic goals of low inflation and maximum employment.

AbstractThe last decade has seen the rise of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF's "travel" capacities across geographies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the policy process. We assess these capabilities by reviewing extant research and mapping newly explored territories. While we find that the NPF embodies all necessary conditions to travel to different settings, the empirical applications remain largely confined to the U.S. and European contexts, environmental policy, the meso level of analysis, the use of content analysis of documents as a methodological approach, and only a few combinations with other theories of the policy process. Our findings indicate that the NPF can travel well. However, we call for further research to conceptualize the NPF's macro level, to replicate NPF scholarship beyond liberal democratic institutional contexts, and to affirm the framework's capacity to be generalizable in varied settings.